Wow! We’re off to a great start towards a book on the new liberal arts. How do I know? My scrollbar gets teeeeny-tiny when I click that link.

We’re talking about potential NLAs like archiving, attention economics, branding, collaboration, home economics, mapping, micropolitics, photography, play, urbanism, writing for computers — the list goes on and on. And I’m realizing that we’re going to have to get good at a bunch of these new skills, fast, just to make this thing.

So what comes next? Starting this weekend, we’ll reach out to some contributors from the comment thread on that original post; then, we’ll all spend the next week writing and editing. The deadline for copy will be Monday, February 16.

After that… we design the book!

Then, of course, there’s printing; we’re thinking hard about that step. If you have any tips, insights, or leads related to that part of the process, we’d love to hear them. You can leave a comment on this post or send an email: Is there a printing company you love? Some new print-on-demand scheme that we should know about? Elephant poop paper? Etc.

Look for another book update early next week. And, if you haven’t yet suggested a new liberal art of your own — now is precisely the time! Jump in.

RJ, Thanks for your lovely note. Let me just add that I (I can’t and most likely don’t speak for Matt and Robin) definitely agree that it’s really the industrial revolution and the changes that wrought, not just to work and society and technology but to culture, that we’re trying to come to grips with. The role played by developments on the web or elsewhere in the past ten years is comparatively small.

Don’t get me wrong — I think the changes brought by the internet and electronic communications more broadly are real, BUT I think that one of the big things that is happening now, in no small part thanks to these breakthroughs, is that we’re finally better able to understand what the industrial revolution’s global effects really were.

One of my favorite jokes from Futurama goes like this:

FRY: Hey, you have no right to criticize the twentieth century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam boat and the cotton gin.